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Joe Lieberman assuming the Zell Miller mantle

Harry Reid must be as slimy as Tom Daschel was in the Democratic Party Cloakroom

The conversion of former Georgia Lieutenant Governor and U.S. Senator Zell Miller from Yellow Dawg Democrat to the DINO (Democrat in name only) that endorsed President George W, Bush for re-election at the 2004 GOP convention began with his first encounter of the glazed-over, in denial lying eyes of “Bush-lied” fellow Democrat Senators in caucus meetings on Capitol Hill in 2003-4.

So disgusted with the un-patriotic, US-enemy emboldening speech and actions of the Democratic Party after mass stockpiles of WMD were not found in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, that he stopped attending their meetings. But Senator Miller, appointed by Roy Barnes, then Democrat Governor of the Peach State, to complete the term of Paul Coverdell after his death, never got so disgusted that he changed parties.

Joe Lieberman is younger than Zell Miller and making bold, unprecedented moves against the party he has caucused with for his entire career, even considering the fact that he is, technically an “Independent Democrat” and not the plain vanilla variety after the World’s Oldest Party tried to defeat him for re-election after he dared to support a Republican Commander-in-Chief while his nation was at war. The wars, we might add, that the vast majority of democrats voted to launch, support and fund for years, but I digress.

Has any senator since the late 1950s or early 1960s announced his intention to filibuster major legislation proposed by his own Majority Leader, until Senator Lieberman announced his intention to filibuster the Harry Reid version of ObamaCare less than two hours after the senior senator from Nevada proposed it earlier this week? Could any conservative Republican had made a more categorically conservative argument against ObamaCare than this:

“We’re trying to do too much at once,” Mr. Lieberman said. “To put this government-created insurance company on top of everything else is just asking for trouble for the taxpayers, for the premium payers and for the national debt. I don’t think we need it now.”

I will not argue that Joe’s statement is unique as compared to statements regularly made my conservative Republicans, because we have many in the GOP that do so. But Lieberman, unlike Republicans that regularly disagree with their party and who go out of their way to reach across the aisle to Democrats, only very rarely gets invited to co-star on the Sunday Shows to be praised as courageous.

Yet, who has displayed more of the kind of career threatening courage memorialized in JFK’s Pulitzer-prize winning book: Lieberman or McCain?

Did the GOP run a candidate against him in his last party primary? Was he ever deprived of power within the caucus? Has their been an absence of McCain or his “vice-president” Lindsey Graham on Sunday TV before Noon? I think not.

The junior senator from Connecticut continues:

Mr. Lieberman added that he’d also oppose a bill that includes Mr. Reid’s provision for states to “opt-out” of the public program “because it still creates a whole new government entitlement program for which taxpayers will be on the line.”

Lieberman was not content merely to threaten one filibuster. He felt compelled to issue a pre-emptive strike against the tricks the Dems have up their sleeve to try and fool the public into letting the nose of the socialized medicine camel under the free market tent.

Was Lieberman content merely to pronounce on the ubiquitous issue of the day? Not on your life. Yesterday:

Sounding more like an independent than a Democrat, Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., tells ABC News he will campaign for some Republican candidates during the 2010 midterm elections and may not seek the Democratic Senate nomination when he runs for re-election in 2012.

“I probably will support some Republican candidates for Congress or Senate in the election in 2010. I’m going to call them as I see them,” Lieberman said in an ABC News “Subway Series” interview aboard the U.S. Capitol Subway System.

Joe Lieberman has always distinguished himself from the blood-sucking vampire in need of a stake through its heart that we all know as the National Democratic Party, especially on national security and values issues (with the glaring exception of abortion, regretfully).

The Senate Cloakroom for donkeys must be reaching a stultifying level of disgust for Joe to defy his “leaders” in such brazen ways, and given the tenor of his conservative rhetoric, one has to wonder if he might be ready to cross the aisle as Jumpin’ Jim Jeffords did in 2002.

This conservative Republican rooster is ready to crow with joy if he does.